Wednesday, November 30, 2005

New Orleans gets the MuniWifi fever

Yesterday Mayor Ray Nagin announced NO is starting the nations first municipally owned wireless internet system that will be free for all users. Another slavo in the continuing debate about the "fairness" of tax supported entities providing a service that the big telcos think it their domain.

Lot's of people are talking about it - high levels of snark on Slashdot, geeky optimism from Gizmodo, and a really long review of hardware and issues surrounding mesh networks from Daily Wireless.

There are some interesting players trying to bust into the city cloud access game, notably Google and (in a long march to irrelevance) Earthlink.

From the hardware side Cisco announced a new outdoor mesh product, the Aironet 1500, that "operates with Cisco wireless LAN controllers and Cisco Wireless Control System (WCS) Software, centralizing key functions of wireless LANs to provide scalable management, security, and mobility that is seamless between indoor and outdoor deployments."

Several cities already have mesh networks in place; Lebanon OR, Athens GA, Temple AZ, Culver City CA, and Medford OR.

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